Former Cosmo Writer Says Magazine Published Feminist Lies | Underreported

Sue Ellen Browder, a former Cosmo writer for 20 years, wrote fake news before “fake news” was ever a thing. Except she prefers not to call it that—not because she’s embarrassed to admit she wrote fake news (although she’s certainly not proud), but because she thinks the term “fake news” is too vague to understand.

Instead, she prefers the term "propaganda." And decades later, she's coming clean about the lies she sold to help Cosmopolitan convince women that sexual liberation was the key to happiness and success.

Tragically, the readers of Cosmopolitan weren't the only ones to buy into the propaganda. At 27 years old, Browder was happily married with two children at home. When she became pregnant with a third, she and her husband got an abortion. It was 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade.

“I did not realize what a traumatic experience that would be later in my life, how much that would haunt me.”

About 20 years later, in 1994, Browder’s last piece appeared in Cosmopolitan. Three decades after that, she converted to Catholicism and sought the help of the church to heal her from the abortion.

“When you start betraying the truth, it will come back to haunt you,” she says. “It will get you in the end. And that's why even though I knew we were making up stories, I still got sucked in and thought abortion would be OK.”

In 2015, she published a book on her experience, "Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement."

In it, Browder says pro-life women must reclaim the feminist movement for themselves. In fact, she says, pro-life feminism is the "authentic version" of feminism.

But reclaiming feminism won’t be easy. It will require girls and young women to reject the ideas being sold to them in the pages of Cosmopolitan and almost everywhere else.